DIY Archives - Sadler House

DIY

All of the posts under the "DIY" tag.

Vacation Rental Owner Advice: Top Tips

Some of our most popular posts have been those giving vacation rental owner advice. For people dreaming of starting their own vacation rental, tips on budgeting, furnishing, and running that rental can be worth their weight in gold!

We don’t have all the answers, but we’ve shared some! Check out these articles to get started:

Planning Your Vacation Rental

Budgeting for your Vacation Rental : Make sure you’ve considered even the expenses we didn’t initially think of! Learn from our mistakes.

Choosi Vacation Rental Owner Advice - Sadler House ng Vacation Rental Furnishings : Sensible and beautiful can be one and the same. Learn to choose the right palette and the right furniture to please guests and protect your wallet.

Decorating your Vacation Rental : Once the basics are in place, the fun stuff begins! Linens, furniture, and more.

Designing a Bunk Room : Guess what? You can really screw this up! Get our tips and avoid the close calls we had while choosing the furniture for this very popular space.

Running Your Vacation Rental

Cleaning Secrets for your Vacation Rental : If you’re not cleaning your own house, how does that work? Read our best tips for keeping your cleanings on track and your guests delighted.

Vacation Rental Maintenance Checklist: Sometimes you need more than a routine turnover cleaning! Read about what we do during our visits and, minimally, on an annual basis.

Creating Your Own Furnishings

Industrial Coffee Table : Our most popular post to date! Build your own beautiful coffee table using plumbing parts.

Tray Table Hack : We use these transformed tray tables throughout the house and they have performed like champs!

Custom Coasters : Encourage guests not to leave rings your fabulous tables (you can try!) These are adorable and easy to make.

Make Useful Vacation Rental Signs

Coastal Non-Smoking Sign

WiFi Password (Cabins)

WiFi Password (Beach House)

We hope this vacation rental owner advice will help you as you pursue your own dream home.

Please consider following us on Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook and you’ll always get our latest! Better yet, come and stay with us! Book directly.

Sadler House November 30, 2017 Leave A Comment Permalink

Tic Tac Toe Keepsake

In order to give guests the optimal experience at your vacation rental, it’s important to pay attention to those little extras. Years ago, before we had our own place, we stayed at a vacation rental in the area of Luray, Virginia. When we arrived, the owner had left us a basket of goodies, including a pound cake she had baked, herself. Between that and the generous stack of white towels, we were immediately predisposed to enjoy our stay. We felt very welcome. Tic Tac Toe Keepsake - DIY

Now that we are sharing Sadler House with guests, we try to carry on our own gift basket tradition. We aren’t living next door, so we can’t bake each guest a fresh pound cake. Instead, I’ve tried to come up with fun little crafts that our guests will find both charming and useful. We hope that these little touches and a welcome card will make show our guests how thankful we are to be hosting them.

Recently, I was scrolling through Pinterest and I came to a stop at this craft by Megan at the blog Balancing Home. The product was an adorable little tic tac toe set that was made from rocks and carried in a teeny burlap bag.

While I was reading the post, I started pondering how I might incorporate this craft into my gift baskets. I resolved to find some sort of rocks and burlap bags on my next trip to the craft store and give it a go.

Well, we all know you rarely find exactly what you’re looking for, right? Instead of the natural burlap bags, I happened upon a stack of sea foam green ones on clearance in the cake decorating aisle, of all places. I got a bunch of them for 50 cents each. The color reminded me a bit of a Tiffany box, and I hatched a plan to make my tic tac toe kit a little fancier. Here’s what I did, and I hope you love the results as much as I do! Read more →

Sadler House November 2, 2015 2 Comments Permalink

Decorating Your Vacation Rental: 5 Important Tips

Decorating their vacation rental is something most owners have done in Decorating A Vacation Rental - Sadler House their minds, even before they had houses to decorate. I know this from the many people who pin my posts to their boards entitled “Beach House” or “Lake House” or “My Future Vacation Rental.” Planning is a crucial part of the process, if only because it keeps you going when everyone around you tells you that you are nuts.

When the paint colors have been chosen and the house is nearly ready for occupants, it’s important to reevaluate your previous plans and make sure they fit the house you actually bought and the people who are actually going to be viewing your listing. It’s also important to consider tedious practical matters like maintenance.

Never fear! Decorating your vacation home will still be as much fun as you’d hoped. Just keep these five guidelines front and center for a home that will attract your guests as well as delighting you. Read more →

Sadler House September 2, 2015 5 Comments Permalink

Industrial Coffee Table

If someone asked me to define the style I had in mind when we furnished Sadler House, it would be tough to summarize. We wanted the house to be comfortable, yes. We wanted it to be grounded and unfussy. Most of all, we wanted it to feel fresh and light.

Industrial Coffee Table - Sadler House We also had a tight budget.

Have you ever gone shopping for a coffee table? Man, those can be expensive! After building the farmhouse table for the dining room, I importuned Dan to take on the coffee table. Even buying one used to refinish was looking to be much too expensive. Why not just craft our own?

While scrolling through the hundreds of tutorials on Pinterest, I came across a photo of a table someone made using wood and plumbing parts. That was it. I loved the spare and sturdy design.

All the materials we used for this table were found at our local home improvement store. If you wanted to, you could do this really cheaply using pine. We splurged a little and went with poplar, since it is more durable and has a cleaner look after being stained.

All-told, buying the materials for the table cost us about $125…although I must confess I have long-since misplaced the receipt (oops). Suffice to say, we got a beautiful new table for much less than we would have paid in a store. Read more →

Sadler House March 8, 2015 42 Comments Permalink

From Curbside to Cozy: Master Bed Makeover

Every trash day, my son notices that I drive more slowly down our neighborhood street. I was mortified the day he said “Are you looking for stuff for the house?”

Busted.

I’m pretty choosy (and a little sheepish) about grabbing discarded items off the curb, but this is what I figure: curbside finds are both free and ecologically friendly! Furthermore, you sometimes come upon a gem you wouldn’t know where to find anywhere else.

When we were decorating Sadler House on a budget, we talked a lot about how we could make our master bedroom more elegant without shelling out the big bucks for a headboard. Of course, there are tons of headboard tutorials on Pinterest, but we were hesitant to take any of these projects on with so little experience.

Then, one trash day, I saw this odd piece of heavy, overly decorative fabulousness on the curb.

Dark and overwhelming, but full of possibilities!

I furtively grabbed it off the trash pile and threw it in the back of my car. When I showed it to my husband, he was dubious. What did I think I was going to do with it? I shrugged. “Hang it on the wall?”

He was skeptical.

It was about this time that I discovered Annie Sloan® chalk paint. I decided that this piece would be so much less oppressive if it were white. What if I messed it up? Well, it didn’t matter, since it was free, after all.

Sadler House June 9, 2014 Leave A Comment Permalink

Industrial Stool Makeover

Last fall, I saw an ad for a huge batch of salvaged school art room stools on my local swap group. A woman had bought up the lot when the school renovated, and she had a bunch of them for sale at $20 each. She clarified that they did need “TLC” and would have to have new feet and reconditioning or replacement of the seats. Having recently been horrified by the price of new stools, however, I thought this was a great chance to replace the too-tall aqua ones that had come with the kitchen counter at the house.

Too tall! Too…aqua.

We ended up buying three of these stools, choosing ones that had not had the seat painted, because we figured they’d be easier to work with. This is basically what they all looked like. Thankfully, nobody had stuck gum under the seats in all their years at the school!

Not bad. Not great!

Sadler House May 13, 2014 Leave A Comment Permalink

Tray Table Hack

If there’s one thing that annoys me when I’m trying to relax, it’s not having somewhere to put down my glass.

Sometimes it’s just WATER, people. No need to make jokes!

Having the right coaster is great, but isn’t it irritating when there’s no bedside table or no end table near you? I just hate having to put my drink on the floor. Inevitably, my kids end up kicking it over.

We’ve been struggling to find lots of affordable, cute little tables so that visitors to Sadler House never have their drinks kicked over. A few weeks ago, my husband hauled this tray table out of our coat closet and said “Can we just trash this?”

Box store beauty, right here.

“Uh-uh!!!” I countered. That post-college-box-store-lived-with-me-through-my-twenties tray table? It was perfect for one or two drinks. I was going to make that table over.

Sadler House March 17, 2014 8 Comments Permalink

Making Custom Coasters

When you’re spending a lot of time making tables for your vacation house, you can’t help but think about providing lots and lots of coasters. You know…in case people are open to avoiding rings on those tables.

Shopping around for coasters, you quickly realize that even the stupidest coasters seem to cost a lot of money. Also, the most affordable ones always seem to be those cheap ones that stick to the bottom of your glass when your glass is sweating and then drop water into your lap.

I wanted heavy, natural stone coasters, but they were all so expensive! I started looking around on Pinterest to see if there was a way I could make my own natural stone coasters, preferably with a custom imprint that would suit our house. Well, of course, there are a million tutorials out there about transferring images to any number of different surfaces. However, all the ones that exist for coasters seem to date back to a time when color copies were created with toner. Since inkjet is the norm now, the mod podge and nail polish crafts I encountered no longer worked with pictures I could produce easily at home. After ruining several coasters, I gave up on transferring a copied photo and went searching for another method.

In the end, my dreams of custom coasters were made possible by this helpful video via Caroline and allfreechristmascrafts.com which demonstrates using permanent ink and a stamp, and then baking the tiles in the oven to set them. Switching gears, I went to my local craft store and easily found the StazOn ink for about $9 and the perfect compass stamp for about $15. With coupons, I got discounts on both. In the end, my craft store trip cost me about $14.

Sadler House March 3, 2014 4 Comments Permalink

Refinishing a Buffet

Before we even had closed on the house, we had a moment of reckoning at a garage sale around the corner from our home in Virginia.

These people down the street were moving away, and they were desperate to pare down their stuff. There were some rugs, DVDs, clothes, and other items that didn’t matter to me. Behind it all, though, was the buffet.

This photo doesn’t even show the ham-handedness of the paint job.

I saw it and I was immediately drawn to it. Even as my heart beat faster and I imagined running home to get my husband, I thought “You are a nut job. Where are you going to put this?” Well, DUH. In the house in Maine.

The house we didn’t yet actually own.

Sadler House January 24, 2014 17 Comments Permalink

DIY

Planning Your Vacation Rental

Running Your Vacation Rental

Creating Your Own Furnishings

Make Useful Vacation Rental Signs

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